Terry Gross: “Are you trying to say to me that all that matters to you is money?”
Gene Simmons: “I will contend, and you try to disprove it, that the most important thing as we know it on this planet, in this plane, is, in fact, money. Want me to prove it? …The first thing you need–besides air, which so far is free, and by the way if you went scuba diving, you’re paying for air–the other thing besides that is food, it’s what we need to survive. I don’t know what other tool I would use besides money to buy it. Although, as a woman of course you have the ability to sell your body, then get the money, and then, with that, get food. But ultimately money is part of it.”

–Excerpt from Gene Simmons’s Feb. 4, 2002, interview with Terry Gross, host of NPR’s “Fresh Air”

Kiss fans hoping for a new album will have to make do with the band’s “Rock & Roll All Night” toothbrush instead. Because according to Kiss frontman Gene Simmons, the band won’t be going into the studio anytime soon.

Seems Simmons has been a bit disillusioned with the recording industry lately–particularly its failure to stamp out illegal file-sharing. “The record industry doesn’t have a f—ing clue how to make money,” Simmons told Bilboard. “It’s only their fault for letting foxes get into the henhouse and then wondering why there’s no eggs or chickens. Every little college kid, every freshly scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They’ve got freckles.”

KISS finally took the stage with many lights, flames, pyrotechnics and, yes, blood oozing from Gene Simmons’s mouth. Many partyers had their faces painted to look like different members of the band. And these are the people who design and operate the biggest, most sophisticated and mission-critical networks in the world. A company’s lifeblood is entrusted to someone decked out and painted up to look like KISS drummer Peter Criss. As one customer from Minnesota remarked to me while we were both waiting for an opportunity to use the portable facilities, ‘It’s hard to believe that some of the smartest people in the world are here.’”

–Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy on the conclusion of Networkers at Cisco Live 2007

Cisco CEO John Chambers may be a silver-tongued orator, but he’s no Gene Simmons. Following Kiss’s “headlining” appearance at last week’s Networkers at Cisco Live extravaganza in Anaheim, Calif., the band’s freakishly long-tongued frontman joined bandmate Paul Stanley to offer his thoughts on “the connected life” in a Cisco video blog.

I’m not sure which is more astonishing–Simmons heralding in the video below the advent of “the connected life” and Stanley complaining that today’s handheld screens are too small and difficult to read, or the fact that Cisco hired a fire-breathing, blood-spitting, ’70s glam rock band to close out a company event.